A new search engine built for obsessive fans has raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding to make “going down the rabbit hole” a feature, not a bug.
A startup known as Lore is building a research-by-fandom platform that “maps theories, timelines, readings, and cultural context” so users can dive deep into a topic without losing the thread.
Created by Zehra Naqvi, a former consumer investor with Headline Ventures who has an art history degree from Columbia, Lore bills itself as a “lurk-first” experience that logs what you read, links related ideas, and turns curiosity into personalized knowledge graphs. The round was led by Village Global, with participation from Precursor Ventures.
A search engine built to explore deep fandom obsessions
Unlike search, which is optimized for quickly getting you information, Lore is designed to be a tool for slow looking over time. The product mines fandom artifacts — fan theories, essays, interviews, Easter eggs — and lets its users zoom in and out between granular details and the larger map of concepts that make up their world. Think of it as a living card catalog for the contemporary fandom internet, where discovery, context, and continuity converge.
Central to the pitch is perseverance. Lore constructs a private, growing graph of your interests, curates a feed of updates that matter, and delivers monthly reports to represent what you’ve been obsessing about. The company describes the experience as “playful research”: slightly more structured than a social feed, less rigid than a database, and oriented toward the satisfaction of connecting dots.
Early funding, initial traction, and testing signals
Naqvi is a solo founder and has already made two early hires in marketing and engineering. The company is silent on how it works while it prepares for a wider public debut, though internal testing offers a nod. In one experiment, Lore gathered more than 1,000 sign-ups, almost 24,000 searches, and around 200 hours of total deep-dive activity — a profile of engagement that suggests the rabbit-hole use case could be replicable.
Lore intends to use the new capital for user acquisition, further product testing, and refinement of its personalization engine. The thesis: Hardcore fans are underserved by current search and social platforms, and a purposefully designed experience can turn their attention into long-term retention.
Why today’s sprawling fandom communities need structure
Fandom is enormous, but fragmented. Discussions rove Reddit, Discord, TikTok, YouTube, and fandom-specific wikis. The company Fandom — which operates the world’s largest wiki platform — has said that its properties serve hundreds of millions of visitors per month, a scale that makes fan-powered research inescapable. But the way from a short video to a three-hour lore dive remains disconnected, and personal reading history is virtually never preserved in any kind of useful form later on.
Scholars such as Henry Jenkins have long heralded participatory culture as a commons-based knowledge engine. Lore is betting that the next frontier isn’t more places to post — it’s better scaffolding for reading, connecting, and remembering. That view reflects a broader industry shift toward quieter, less distractingly designed consumer tools at a time when people are sick of algorithmic feeds.
How It’s Different From AI Search And Forums
The inescapable comparisons are with AI-native search engines and community platforms. Services such as Perplexity make explicit the focus on brief answers and source synthesis; Reddit and Wikipedia leverage community knowledge generation, drawing together canonical references. Lore’s distinctiveness is its people graph, obsession tracking, and rabbit-hole navigation — the connective tissue that lets you move from a character theory to a production detail to an explanation of some cultural artifact without losing your way.
The company does not share its underlying technology, but the product philosophy leans toward an AI-based approach that prioritizes citations and context windows over black-box summaries, emphasized by user-driven curation. The experience is built for lurkers — people interested in depth without posting — providing you with a way to discover that feels intentional, not feed-driven.
What to watch next as Lore readies a broader public debut
As consumer AI tools circle around to become shopping agents and all-purpose assistants, Lore is staking out a kind of refuge: occasionally we need something that was designed with no purpose other than searching for passion, memory, and play. If it can transform scattered fandom browsing into a unified, fulfilling habit — and do so responsibly, with privacy in mind and without trampling original sources — it could be a must-use part of the media discovery stack alongside forums and wikis.
The early signs are promising, the market size is vast, and the issue — how to travel deep without taking a wrong turn — is unresolved. For both the obsessive fan and idle browser, Lore wants to make the internet’s rabbit holes accessible once more.